The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough (review)

KELLY MCDONOUGH'S The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico is a fascinating account and analysis of Nahua intellectuals from the early sixteenth century to the present. All are writers whose works are mainly in the Nahuatl language. The book begins with a quote from a contemporary student who has learned his Nahua ancestors wrote: "So all this time they were lying to us, the schoolteachers. They said we were stupid burrohmeh, nothing but donkeys. I guess they were wrong" (3). This moment when an Indigenous person breaks through the mental wall created by the systematic erasure of their own history is the reason why many academics (including me) are working on Indigenous intellectual histories. Reconstructing this knowledge of the brilliance and skill of our ancestors for our peoples is one of the ways we can recover from the cultural bombs of colonialism (see, for instance, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature). The construction of the divide between savagery and civilization as alphabetic writing justified European colonialism for the colonizers, and the subsequent processes of historiography and settler colonialism have hidden from view the talents of Indigenous peoples in not only their own modes of writing, but the European alphabetic system as well. McDonough's book demonstrates the breadth and depth of the history of Nahuatl alphabetic writing while educating us in the history of the Nahua people along the way. McDonough's methodology importantly includes collaboration and the return of knowledge to the Nahua communities. The book makes substantial contributions in the areas of Indigenous history, Indigenous language revitalization, Nahuatl language and contemporary politics, and Indigenous research methodologies.

Chapter 1 tells the story of Antonio del Rincón, "the first Indigenous person in the Americas to write a grammar of his own language" and "perhaps the only Indigenous man ordained by the Jesuits in the early colonial period" (34). Rincón contributed to the colonization of his people through assisting the evangelical project by teaching other priests the Nahuatl language, but he also made substantial intellectual contributions.

Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, "the author/compiler of one of the richest extant Nahuatl-language historical annals of the altepetl (city/state) of Tlaxcala" (63), is the focus of chapter 2. Zapata's written work "is a rich testament to Indigenous survival, cultural pride, and political finesse in times of crisis and change" (82).

Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the work of the nineteenth-century professor of law and Nahuatl and Otomí languages Faustino Galicia Chimapopoca. He transcribed and translated "scores of colonial-period Nahuatl texts" and authored many religious works in both Nahuatl and Spanish. His work has been critiqued as flawed and, as a result, "nearly erased from historical memory" (115), but McDonough persuades us that all interested in the survival of Nahuatl and the record of writing in it owe him gratitude for his acts to preserve the archive.

Chapters 4 and 5 introduce us to two twentieth-century Nahua intellectuals, Doña Luz Jiménez and Ildefonso Maya Hernández. Jiménez's visage has become an icon of Mexico, as she modeled for the likes of Diego Rivera and Jean Charlot, but here McDonough productively reverses the gaze and exchanges the medium (paraphrasing her words) as she analyzes Jiménez's testimonial writings and short stories. The stories constitute perhaps the only "published Nahuatl-language texts that narrate the firsthand experience of assimilative education for Indians in early twentieth-century Mexico" (123). Hernández was an educator, playwright, artist, and activist whose work depicts "the challenges faced by Indigenous people in Mexico today" (160). Some of the most interesting of Hernández's works are bilingual twentieth-century codices in the style of his ancestors. McDonough explains they were "a move to recover and redesign Indigenous discursive and material communication tools" (189).

Overall, this detailed examination of Nahua writing from the sixteenth century to the present...